In a partial victory for gun rights advocates, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Second Amendment right to bear arms limits state and local authority to restrict gun ownership.
The 5-4 ruling reversed a lower court decision that upheld a 1982 Chicago ordinance that barred city residents from owning handguns. The decision came almost two years after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns in District of Columbia v. Heller.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the right to bear arms must apply to state and local governments, like other guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
The decision is a symbolic victory for gun rights advocates, but provided little practical guidance for courts to decide which gun control laws fall under the Second Amendment, The New York Times reports. In fact, the court did not decide the constitutionality of the two gun control laws at issue–the one in Chicago and in nearby Oak Park, Ill. It remanded those determinations to the lower courts.
The dissenting judges maintained that the Heller precedent was incorrect, and that they would not have applied it to state and local laws even if they did think it was correct.
“Firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent. “The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crimes have devastated many of our communities.”
